Learning Android Development

Demystify Maven Ecosystem for Beginner Android Developers

Understanding where we get our library from and how we share

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

When we first learn to develop in Android, we just follow the tutorial steps and code accordingly. A few of the parts we don’t even understand especially the code in Gradle.

If you like to learn basic about Gradle for Android development, check this out.

We probably have seen code as below

repositories {
    google()
    mavenCentral()
    jcenter()
    mavenLocal()
}

I know these are places storing all libraries, but that’s it, and not knowing what it means.

And lately, you probably heard the JCenter is retiring on Feb 1, 2022. Many are asked to move to MavenCentral instead. So I check out a little detail, and came across terms like Sonatype, Nexus, JFrog, Bintray, OSSRH… what are they? How are they related?

So I did a simple quest and clear it out for myself and draw the below diagram. I was hoping to find such a diagram to clear my confusion, since I didn’t have one, I made one and hope it benefits others.